World War II to the Cold War: The Rise of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex and Economic Impact Analysis under Computer Simulation

From World War II to the Cold War (1945-1991), the U.S. military-industrial complex went through a process from its rise to its full expansion, which had a profound impact on the global political and economic landscape. In this paper, computer simulation techniques are used to construct a vector autoregressive model (VAR) to quantitatively analyze the impact of the military-industrial complex on the U.S. economy. Smoothness and cointegration treatment and Granger causality test are done on the collected sample data. After that, the VAR model between three sets of variables, namely, military expenditure as a share of GDP, consumption as a share of GDP, and investment as a share of GDP, is designed. Using impulse response function and variance decomposition to analyze the data, we get that the rise of the U.S. military-industrial complex can effectively promote the growth of the economy in the long term, and the development of the economy can also promote the development of the military-industrial complex, but the promotion effect is not obvious.